Documenting the Co-Ed Killer case
After he was arrested in 1973 for the murder of eight women, Ed Kemper was asked by police to provide a handwriting sample by copying the note he left at his mother’s and her friend Sally Hallett’s murder scene. The document is signed by Kemper, detective Terry Medina and inspector with the Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office, Richard F. Verbrugge.
Source: Murder Capital of the World by Emerson Murray, 2021
A new book by author Emerson Murray is currently in the works. The book will be about the murders committed in the early 1970s by John Linley Frazier, Herbert Mullin and Ed Kemper. Here is the description that can be found on the book’s website:
The Santa Cruz community looks back at the Frazier, Mullin, and Kemper murder sprees of the early 1970’s
Over 25 people murdered in just over two and a half years. What was happening in the small coastal town of Santa Cruz between October 1970 and February 1973?
John Linley Frazier’s home invasion murders of the Ohta Family and Dorothy Cadwallader in 1970 and the serial murder sprees of Herbert Mullin and Edmund Kemper left an impact on Santa Cruz that can still be felt today.
Local law enforcement, victim’s families and friends, classmates and acquaintances of the killers, local historians, voices from the past and present, and the killers themselves all come together to tell the horrific stories and explain why Santa Cruz was dubbed THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD in the early 1970’s.
The book will feature new material in the Kemper case, including interviews with Detective Terry Medina and Public Defender James L. Jackson. It will also feature interviews with relatives of some of the victims, and with coworkers at the UCSC of Clarnell Strandberg and Sally Hallett. It will also include new information about Kemper’s young fiancee.
***Warning: graphic content***
Cindy Schall was killed by a single shot in the head from Ed Kemper’s .22-calibre pistol. He kept her body in a cupboard overnight, waiting for his mother to go to work. As soon as she left, he brought out the corpse and decapitated it. His years of hanging out at the Jury Room left him with a wary respect of forensic ballistics – so he cut the bullet fragments out of the skull, which he then kept for a while as a trophy.
He then dismembered the body and took a drive along the coast to dispose of it. But when a couple of weeks later Kemper learned that the police had already recovered Cindy’s remains, he panicked and buried her head in his back garden.
Representatives from the Santa Cruz sheriff’s office, city police and the district attorney’s office looked on as detectives dug a 16-inch deep hole and found the decaying head. Because authorities pinpointed the head’s location, it is speculated they were acting on information from Pueblo, Colorado, where Kemper was arrested and has reportedly been giving detailed information on not only the slaying of his mother Clarnell Strandberg, 52, and her friend Sara Taylor Hallett, 59, but also the slaying of six young women.
The head found today had been buried about four feet from the rear of Kemper’s house. For the last several months, Kemper and his mother lived in the duplex apartment.
While the skull was being removed from the hole, the upstairs neighbors glanced down at the yard through a window.
People living next door to the duplex were visibly shaken as they occasionally looked over to where the detectives located the head.
“To think we’ve been living here so peacefully with that laying on the ground,” said one woman, pointing to Kemper’s backyard. A young woman next to her, wearing a Cabrillo College T-Shirt, nodded silently.
Kemper said he buried Cynthia Schall’s head in the backyard of his mother’s apartment house facing the window of the bedroom where he was staying and “talked to it (the head) many times, saying affectionate things… like you would say to a girlfriend or a wife.”
Kemper has also said that he buried Schall’s head in his mother’s yard, facing up toward his mother’s bedroom window, because his mother always wanted people to “look up to her.”
Sources: “Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters”, by Peter Vronsky / “Kemper explains why he murdered coeds”, Register-Pajaronian, November 1, 1973 / “Head found in Aptos”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, April 26, 1973
May 1, 1973. Accused slayer Edmund Emil Kemper towered over detectives Don Smythe (left) and Terry Madina (right) as he was taken into court for arraignment Monday. Kemper waived reading of the eight counts, which include charges of killing several young women and his mother, Clarnell Strandberg. Municipal Court Judge Donald O. May ordered the defendant to be held without bail. The uniformed guard to the right of Kemper is Bruce Colomy.
Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel / Photo by Sentinel Photographer Pete Amos
Source: Bay Area TV Archive
When Ed Kemper was arrested, his car was still parked near his mother’s apartment at 609 A Ord Drive. The police searched it and found, in the trunk, a shovel and a red dishpan. There was also a bloodstained knife, strands of hair and blood stains from his victims’ bodies.
Source: Register-Pajaronian, April 27, 1973, by Marj Von B
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